I'm currently reading The Dark Box: Confession In The Catholic Church, partly because I'm always up for a dose of Catholic history (it's the maddest sort there is) and partly because the only element of my parents' devoutly Catholic upbringing I have ever envied them is the weekly ritual of confession.

I don't know about you, but I run on guilt. I feel bad about everything, from little things such as not laying socks properly flat on the radiator to dry to opening an extra tab on my computer (yes, really. It's something to do with only using your fair share, even of an infinite, cost-free resource. Listen, the whole problem is that I don't make the rules, OK?), and work outwards from there.

Sure, other things come into play now and again: the need to earn money, or… Actually, no, that's it. But my prime motivating force, the engine that powers all else, is guilt. You don't have to be Catholic, of course, to suffer the same fate (though if my anecdotal evidence gleaned from nearly four decades' membership of a family of mentally-convulsing freaks is anything to go by, it does help). It's a temperamental thing. And for those of us who are daily wearied by the ever-accumulating burden it brings, the idea of having somewhere to go every Sunday to be absolved of all your sins (perceived and unperceived, just in case you overlooked something – what catch-all bliss!); and being ascribed a penance has a charm all its own. Just once, I'd like to feel fully shriven, like the bedragoned Eustace in The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, after Aslan scores through his scaly hide and tears it off to leave him standing there "smooth and soft as a peeled switch", and free.

We need to develop a secular alternative. "I can see it now," Toryboy says – and I won't lie (can you imagine the internal contortions if I did?), there is something faintly contemptuous about his tone. "Queues of liberals outside a recycled cardboard confessional in a community centre. 'Forgive me, Father/Mother/Caregiver of either or indeterminate gender, for when somebody made a joke at my dinner table about immigrants, I did not fully ascertain that it was meant meta-ironically before I laughed; nor did I later offset the carbon I emitted while doing so.' 'Write four articles on intersectionality and walk to Waitrose with organic peas in your shoes, while checking your privilege as penance,' your soggy, proportionally represented elected excuse for a father confessor will say. 'And forgive me for being in a position to forgive you.' God almighty. Who art in heaven, actually, and is much better."

You would think that being an atheist would be liberating, but in fact it doesn't make sense. If you believe that there is no god, and that religion is an agglomeration of useful traditions and practices that has evolved to manage our desires and fears, then paralysing panic when these are stripped from you by the rational parts of your brain are entirely logical responses.

"All you need is someone bigger to shout loudly at you," Toryboy says. "Which works out very well for me." I hope he's right. Then maybe the only thing I'll feel bad about is the fact that I don't feel worse.